Ellul, Jacques

Jacques Ellul (1912–94) was one of the 20th century's most articulate critics of technological society. He was born and educated in Bordeaux, France, and spent his career at the University of Bordeaux. From 1944, he was a professor of the history and sociology of institutions in the Faculty of Law and a professor in the Institute for Political Studies. He was a prodigious writer who produced 58 books and more than 1,000 articles. His most famous sociological works are The Technological Society (1954) and Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes (1965). Ellul used the blanket term technique to describe “the totality of methods rationally arrived at, and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.” It was the efficiency and other characteristics inherent in technique that allowed Ellul to claim a natural progression that would ultimately enslave all of humanity in a “global concentration camp.” Ellul wrote more theological books than sociological works, and his “pessimistic” views on technology and media are not fully understandable outside an engagement with his theology. Of his theological works, the most notable are The Presence of the Kingdom (1948), The Politics of God and the Politics of Man (1966), The Meaning of the City (1970), The Ethics of Freedom (1973), and The Humiliation of the Word (1981).

Ellul's key influences were Karl Marx and the Swiss theologian Karl Barth, who served as opposing touchstones of what became a dialectical interpretation of history, reality, and human purpose. In Ellul's phrase “L'existence, c'est résistance” (existence is resistance), we see the essence of both his dialectical worldview and his poetic sensibility.

In relation to gender, Ellul was deeply convinced that inherent in women lay the solutions to the problems created by men:

Specifically, he considered the nature of technology and electronic media as the domain of sight (as opposed to hearing) and thus the embodiment of male characteristics, which led to unavoidable consequences. Thus, for Ellul, the 20th century was simultaneously and inextricably (1) the century of the image, (2) the century of the masculine, and (3) the century that posed the greatest threat to the feminine. This paradoxical viewpoint is directly opposed to Leonard Shlain's position in The Alphabet Versus the Goddess (1998), for example, in which Shlain argues that the rise of the image and fall of the word (via television, film, and the Internet) signify a great re-equalizing of the sexes by bringing equity to the word-image ratio caused by printing press technology. Ellul's view was one in which he saw technique as ultimately embodying the masculine and as ultimately threatening the chances of human survival: